


Love Is

by griever11



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Instropection, One Shot, Romance, Soulmates, oliver is the sappiest romantic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:41:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26164294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/griever11/pseuds/griever11
Summary: Oliver spends time throughout the years thinking about love and Felicity. A lot of time. All the time.A journey through Oliver's thought process over the years as he comes to terms with the concept of love.
Relationships: Olicity, Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak
Comments: 28
Kudos: 167





	Love Is

Love is -

It’s the way his heartbeat races every time he hears her heels click against the cold cement floor, accompanied by the soft humming of whatever earworm is plaguing her genius mind in that moment. 

It’s the way his entire body tingles with anticipation, ready to welcome her presence with genuine warmth because only Felicity, with her ethereal luminescence, can invoke such unfamiliar feelings within him. 

Will she have a slight smirk on her face, a hint of how well her day’s been? Or will her lips be twisted in a scowl, a dusting of light pink painted over them, shimmering with vibrancy under the jarring fluorescent overhead lights, indicating otherwise? 

In the early days of grease paint and a lot less leather, he convinces himself that his fascination with her stems from innocent curiosity. She’s not like anyone else he’s met before and he’s intrigued. She’s smart, yet awkward. Effortlessly funny, but also has a mean streak he doesn’t ever want to bear the brunt of. She’s an enigma, a collection of contradictions that shouldn’t fit together, but does.

Much like the way her bright colours and eternal optimism shouldn't feel so _right_ amidst the darkness that hounds both him and Diggle, but does. 

He tells himself that he’s drawn into her orbit due to a sheer sense of responsibility. Because she’s part of his fight now and he has to protect her, whatever the cost, so _of course_ he needs to stay close to her. It’s not because the way she smells is so intoxicating (of vanilla and perfection), it’s not because his fingers itch to run through her silky smooth ponytail, and it’s definitely not the fact that he’s so far gone for his babbling IT genius that he’s missed the first sign that he’s fallen in love with her: 

That she drives him crazy.

He’s obsessed with her voice, her touch, and the fluttering sensation that skims over his skin whenever she smiles at him, brimming with pride at what little he’s accomplished, in the grand scheme of justice and vengeance. His entire body yearns for her approval, intrinsically pulling him in one hundred different directions because he wants to make her proud. Over and over again, and he finds himself eternally torn between _wanting_ to be completely selfish and _having_ to be selfless.

It doesn’t occur to him for a long time that it’s okay to be a little of both at the same time. 

Until it _does_ and it’s the second best thing he’s ever done for himself, ever. The best being: admitting that he’s irrevocably in love with Felicity. 

Love is an ever-evolving concept, she tells him one night, her lips whisper soft against his sweat-slicked skin.

“You know how much I love mint chip, and that I've loved it from the very beginning of my entire existence. There’s also Digg, who I love, but not as much as mint chip - don’t ever tell him that - _but!_ I’d kill for Digg and not for mint chip. And then there’s Mom, who I love unconditionally, but man do I want to strangle her sometimes, with love, of course.”

It’s always hard to keep up with Felicity on a good day, but throw in being sex-addled to the mix and he struggles even more to figure out where she’s going with this particular train of thought.

“And then there’s y’know, loving _you.”_

A chill courses through his veins. A bit of his heart cracks at the possibility of what _that_ means. Because: 

_‘I don’t want to be someone you love’_

Echoes too loudly in his head, like a battering ram against his skull, over, and over, reminding him that he’s damaged goods and someone as beautiful and pure as Felicity could never love him the way she loves mint chip and Diggle and her mother. 

“I just _ran away_ with you.” 

“I left my home, and a job, and any sense of stability and normalcy to go on this crazy, epic, road-trip with you and I’m just...” 

“I think _this_ love I have for you is bigger than - bigger than all the other loves of my life, and that’s insane to think about because how can I love a person, you, so, so much - and yet feel completely fine with it? Isn’t it strange?”

“It’s not strange,” he tells her through laboured breathing, overwhelmed by the intensity of the conversation, but not at all shying away from it. He curls his hand around the back of her head, tangling the tresses of her hair between his fingers; a luxury that mere months ago had been so far out of his reach. 

“Because I love you the same way.” 

He’s not as masterful with words as she is (though there are more than a few pages in his notebook that may prove otherwise), so he hopes it’s enough. Felicity sighs happily into his chest and then she’s asleep, as if all she needed was the reaffirmation of the magnitude of how he feels about her and _that’s_ exactly when Oliver realises how precious this thing he has with her is. 

He doesn’t actually think his love for her is ever-evolving (not that he dares contradict her out loud). Instead, it feels more like something carved in stone, etched permanently into the fabric of fate and destiny. Loving her feels like he has forbidden magic flowing through his veins. Like he wields a transcendent, all-consuming power that requires the most careful and delicate handling as to not disturb the cosmic balance of the universe. 

(Years and years later, Oliver will come to realise that he _never_ needed, and shouldn’t have had to, handle his love with kid gloves at all.) 

But at the beginning, loving Felicity is as easy as kissing her good morning through her grumbles of ‘Too early, Oliver!’, and dragging her from bed with the promise of breakfast and naked time. As natural as bickering in the cereal aisle at the supermarket, debating the merits of sugar over Vitamin A and fibre. 

It’s wonderful and miraculous and so unfathomable that all he thinks about is cocooning them in a bubble and forgetting about everything and anything else that isn’t Oliver and Felicity. 

But Oliver can’t always get what he wants, and the tentative truce he’s made with the _Powers That Be of the Universe_ descends on him and then - 

Then love becomes _hard._

It tangles itself among webs of lies and deceit. Masks itself beneath the sinister tendrils of time-travel and old secrets and maternal power plays and Oliver loses the fight against the brutal reality of what he finally, _finally,_ understands about love. That it isn't etched in stone, and it really does have evolve with time. Felicity was right, as she usually is. 

Because what his mother did by hiding the pregnancy from him, she did out of a warped sense of love. Samantha kept William from him out of love for her little baby, and what he does to Felicity (and this is the most damning piece of evidence of the evolution of love; how he hurts her by lying and keeping secrets from her, how he betrays her already fragile sense of trust in anyone she lets get close to her) he does it because he loves her _too much._ He loves her with such intense, blinding, ferocity that it twists him up into believing that if he _does_ reveal his dark, festering secrets to her, she’d leave him. 

So he doesn’t. 

And when Felicity gets her legs back, she uses them to walk away from him. 

It nearly ends him. His heart doesn’t shatter, but it turns to stone - like the Thing in the awful Fantastic four movie she made him watch once. The loss is a blackhole that sucks life out of what little he has left of his soul, he needs her like he needs air, but he never stops loving her. 

He loves her from afar, all through the summer of a broken engagement and distant desolation. He loves her as they rebuild the foundations of the Arrow Cave, and he loves her through rebuilding the foundations of _them._

It’s difficult, being around her while not being _with_ her. Her constant presence is a bruise on his skin he can’t help pushing down on, the pain reminding him what his stupidity has cost him. 

He loves her through the terrors that plague him now that he can no longer find comfort in her arms at night. He doesn’t hold it against her, and he still loves her for having given him months of peace and comfort and pure, unadulterated happiness. 

His heart remembers her gentle kindness, her genius and her resolute determination. His body remembers her warmth and the softness of her skin and the way she brushes her lips over every new scar he comes home with.

He holds on to these memories as he re-learns what it means to love someone unconditionally. To trust someone unconditionally. 

He holds on to them as he wades through the swirling bleakness of Billy and Susan and Helix and Adrian Chase, and when he’s faced with the reality of possibly losing everything he holds dear to the hands of a psychopathic murderer on the island that had been his personal Hell for so long. 

His son. The misfit group of vigilante’s that he’s come to recognise as family. 

_Felicity._

Who kisses him. Just in case. 

In that very moment, his aching, stone heart crumbles away and is born anew. He promises himself that if he survives this battle, he’s going to make sure he finds his way back to her one day.

He learns that love is more beautiful the second time around. 

It’s quieter this time. Reverent. It’s burgers and milkshakes under low lights, so they don’t wake William up. It’s whispers of ‘how was your day?’s and ‘I missed you’s and loaded, longing stares over his dinner table. 

It’s the way Felicity looks at him in wonder when he tells her he wants her to be in his and William’s life (forever). Their last first time sends shockwaves of pure relief and pleasure through him, tingling right down to his toes, an affirmation of how dumb he’s been to have ever let her go in the first place. It curls around them with sweet familiarity and a sense of finality because this - _this_ is where he’s always meant to be. 

Love is professing his desperate need to marry her again, multiple times, even with the threat of Nazi doppelgangers looming over them. 

Love is accepting that she doesn’t want to because she’s still scared and hurt. Old, stubborn, uncouth Oliver wouldn’t have taken it lying down, but new Oliver, who is hopelessly in love with Felicity no matter what the circumstances are, accepts her decision. All he needs is her after all. He’ll love her to the ends of the Earth, married or unmarried, and if Felicity doesn’t want to marry him, he doesn’t love her any less for it.

In the end, she does marry him. 

It doesn’t change much except that he has a new found love for the platinum band around his ring finger. He finds himself reaching for it multiple times a day, needing to feel the solid weight of the metal as proof that everything is real. That he’s married to the love of his life and nothing anyone does from now on can change that. 

Not even when he makes the single, stupidest decision he’s ever made in his life (and boy has he made a tonne of those) and gets himself incarcerated. 

He holds on to love once more, trusting it to get him through the ordeal. He clings to his favourite picture he has of William and Felicity, and with it is the single driving force that lends him the strength to return to them. He hopes, with every fibre in his being, that his family can forgive him one more time for his missteps, because he doesn’t think he can survive losing them again. 

Love is the willingness to fight for what he wants. 

He learns this the hard way, when the world he comes back to is a new one where Felicity is friends with a known criminal, uses guns and doesn’t spare a second to rethink the idea of killing someone. He fights for her like he’s never fought before, and he declares with absolute, brutal honesty that his love for her is the only thing that will never, ever change. In this lifetime or in any others. 

Love is trusting Felicity to love him back despite his numerous failures. Love is knowing that she does, and that she will. Forever. 

Love is the near unbearable swell of his emotions, the crescendo in a magnum opus, the rising waves just before they make landfall on the shore, when Felicity, bright eyed and breathless, tells him: 

I’m pregnant. 

Love is overwhelming. All-encompassing and consuming. Once upon a time, a love that great would have sent Oliver running for the hills. He would have been shaken to his bones at the concept of surrendering himself so wholly, and completely to another person, but not now. Now, he embraces it the way he embraces Felicity’s growing bump, submitting himself to the fact that even at the size of a little avocado, baby Queen already has him wrapped around her little not-quite-formed finger. 

Fatherhood suits him. He dotes on Felicity the way he’s never doted on anyone before. Sequestered away in Bloomfield, they live out their Suburbia 2.0 lives, only this time it’s without the guilt of leaving their family behind hanging over them. He builds them a swing set in the backyard and carves a little doll out of soft wood for his baby girl. He names it Tommy. 

He reads every baby book he can get his hands on, because he missed out on it the first time. He splits his time between setting up the cabin for baby Queen’s impending arrival and calling his lawyers about regaining custody of William. He falls into a vigilante-less life so easily and he knows that it’s because for the first time in a very long time, he’s unburdened from everyone else's expectations, untethered from years of survivor’s guilt and because he’s finally doing things that he _really_ loves. 

(And he doesn't just mean Felicity.)

The embodiment of love materialises in the form of the baby girl he gets to hold in his arms for the first time on a sunny Wednesday in October. She’s the physical manifestation of his love for Felicity, the perfect little girl, curious eyes glinting with mischief when she shrieks for attention at two in the morning. 

Oliver doesn’t think he ever understood love properly, evolving definitions or not, until then. His love for Felicity had been wild and unbridled, painful and difficult, confusing, devastating and rewarding and fulfilling at the same time. He’d submitted himself to it, opened himself up to it when he was ready, but Mia? 

His love for Mia is - 

“It’s insane,” he whispers, teary eyed one night, lying in bed as Felicity snuggles in beside him. “How much I love her.” 

His wife arches a sleepy eyebrow at him before shaking her head and kissing his chest. “Not as insane as how much I love her,” she murmurs into his skin.

“I would - I’d rip apart entire universes for her,” he confesses hoarsely. “I’d kill for her. I’d-” 

“That’s what love is, baby,” Felicity interrupts him. She curls an arm around his midsection, then rests her head just under his chin. 

“Love isn’t set in stone. It’s not - some... line in the sand. It’s real, but it’s not tangible. I knew I loved you the moment I met you, horrible lies and all, but I also hated you so much sometimes for making me love you so much.” 

“It’s an evolving concept,” Oliver echoes her statement from many years ago, when they were in similar positions, sleepy and content and happy. He agrees with it now.

“Hmm, yeah, it’s that,” Felicity agrees, not quite remembering that they’re _her_ words he’s repeating back at her. “But it’s also the way you make me feel when you get me to my fifth orgasm in the night. Or when you make me dinner that doesn’t involve kale. Or when you tell me I look beautiful even though I know I don’t. Or when you tell me it’s your turn for Mia’s middle of the night feed when I know it’s really mine.” 

“And love is when you’re willing to rip apart entire universes for our baby girl. God, I love you so much, Oliver.”

Oliver chuckles lightly at Felicity’s dreamy declaration. He squeezes her tightly, cuddling her into his side as he tells her, “I’d rip apart entire universes for you too.” 

Because it’s true. 

Because love is scary and unexpected and unpredictable. It’s huge and monumental and soul-defining. It’s the way his hand fits into hers so perfectly, the way she understands him better than he understands himself. Love is the way she accepts him, with all his faults, and despite all the mistakes he’s made in the past. Love is how immeasurable their love for their baby girl is and love is - 

Love is -

Just _this._

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know. I was in my feelings a lil bit. Hope you liked this :) 
> 
> Twitter: griever_11


End file.
